Nine months ago, when Labor MPs would still confidently burst into a crazy “bahaha” laugh at suggestions that Kevin Rudd had a chance of being prime minister again – even though the polls then were exactly where they are now – there was a Kevin Plan.

We will call it the People Power Plan, even if that has the connotation of the innocence of women offering flowers to soldiers pointing guns at them, when we all know such things don’t feature in the brutal world of federal Labor Party politics.

The essence of the Kevin Plan hasn’t really changed since then.

It pits him as The People’s Candidate against Julia Gillard as The Candidate of the Evil and Faceless Men, in both the arena of the caucus and with the public.

It now pits the flawed history of the Rudd administration against the equally spotted history of the Gillard government.

The caucus has squirmed around the terrible truth it has refused to face for the better part of a year now. But MPs left Canberra on Thursday night unable any longer to ignore two grim realities: the Gillard experiment hasn’t worked; and Labor’s stubbornly entrenched polling figures don’t just mean election loss – they mean near annihilation.

No one yet knows how a power shift would happen.

Gillard supporters still dare Rudd to bring it on. He doesn’t yet have the numbers to do so, despite the continuing catastrophes.

Rudd supporters are starting to say Gillard really needs to think about resigning.

But if there were to be a second coming, what prospect is there that it would be all that different?

By definition, Rudd can’t look as if he actually has a plan, because that would be presumptuous of The People speaking.

Rudd’s supporters say he isn’t making any deals. They say Rudd would seek to finish a full term to confirm to people that Labor can govern and govern well.

He would rebuild bridges with business, opening a new dialogue on policy after the unpleasantness of the mining tax and reassuring those in business that Labor wasn’t really as far into the clutches of the unions as they believed.

He would bring relatively clean hands to the vexed issue of boat people (even if not to change the policy much) and listen to The People about how the carbon tax was affecting them.

Oh, and many people believe he might make Chris Bowen treasurer.

Bowen’s elevation would be brutally unfair to Wayne Swan, who has steered the economy through grave crisis and the budget past prime ministerial enthusiasms.

But few in the ALP believe Swan could survive another leadership change and the government needs to change the politics of its economic story.

We don’t know what would happen to Julia Gillard or the rest of the cabinet, because it is not yet clear how any transition to Rudd would actually take place.

However, the threshold question about a Rudd comeback must be answered by his colleagues, not by him. And it is not the question of whether they would vote for him.

The weakness revealed in this government under both prime ministerships has been the collapse of cabinet government and collective responsibility.

Modern politics worldwide focuses on leaders. The trend in Australia grew under John Howard.

By choosing his own frontbench and increasing unilateral power, Rudd made it worse, and Gillard has appeared unable to reverse the trend.

Labor frontbenchers used to whinge about Kevin being mean to them and whinge now about Gillard’s mistakes.

But they need to consider how we got to a point where it is the Prime Minister who goes out alone each day to defend the government’s position; who is, it appears, the only one responsible for these decisions.

An argument frequently put for why caucus members could never bring back Rudd is that they know what he is like. The counter case is that they could presume he will not change, and that they therefore need to move to ensure that – collectively – the government harnesses the best of its leader and constrains his worst excesses.

Rudd’s People Power Plan – going back well into last year – would have him returned to power in an assertion of caucus people power as backbench MPs saw the error of their way in allowing themselves to be railroaded into removing him, conceded that “The People” (that is, the polls) were right and they were wrong, and agreed to restore him.

In earlier iterations, Rudd would have also gone to the ALP national conference and insisted the party be returned to The People via the party reforms recommended by Bob Carr, Steve Bracks and John Faulkner in their review of the 2010 election campaign.

As a result, disillusioned Labor voters would return from the Greens; the ALP membership would be rewarded for its long suffering.

In all this is the crucial issue that would determine the success of a return to Rudd – and this is whether it would involve a real change in the machinations of the Labor Party, or just be another fix by the faceless men.

The most interesting part of the ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday – apart from the Prime Minister-looking-shifty bit – was Joe de Bruyn.

Among all the would-bes and has-beens strutting their stuff on the program that night, de Bruyn was the only person who could rightly call himself a “powerbroker”. He heads the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association. He is a vice-president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and is a member of the ALP’s national executive.

De Bruyn told Four Corners “there was no fundamental reason why [Rudd in June 2010] could not have gone on to win the election”.

Of events at that time he said: “I rang six people and five of them told me in no uncertain terms that there was no way they were going to vote for Kevin Rudd.

“I was very surprised by that. I had no chance at all of influencing their views.”

De Bruyn’s comments revealed some of the cracks in the easy story about the ALP being a juggernaut driven wilfully by manipulators of an easily herded backbench: the union powerbroker didn’t know about it and didn’t agree with it.

Let’s not go through all the entrails again but, rather, note the indelible impressions of the night that were left on voters. These will be important in where events go next: there was the Australian Workers Union’s Paul Howes going on Lateline to talk about his role; Bill Shorten, in perhaps the dumbest move of his political career, walking up and down outside a restaurant, talking on his mobile phones, as cameras whirled.

And in almost every sentence uttered on television and radio were references to Shorten and the NSW Right’s Mark Arbib falling in behind Gillard.

Roll forward to this weekend. The Australian Financial Review reported on Friday that the NSW Labor machine had told its MPs it would not intervene in any Labor leadership showdown.

People phoned to say that this was not true. Oh really? So you are saying the NSW machine – the faceless machine of the faceless men – will intervene in a Labor leadership showdown? If they really insist this is true, they have not understood what has happened to Labor in the past 18 months.

Members of the caucus are, however, starting to understand how the spectre of electoral annihilation is forcing them to do something different this time around, and not merely endorse yet another product of the machine.

The message to NSW Right MPs wasn’t that the machine was shifting its support to Rudd. It was that it wouldn’t threaten people’s preselections if they shifted votes.

Some might see this as a belated attempt to look as though something that is already happening was all part of your plan.

But there is a bigger point here.

A number of small-time caucus thugs control a few votes here and there. The very public role of others such as Arbib in the leadership coup makes it very difficult for them to do anything other than stick with Gillard, if they are to retain any shred of personal credibility.

But if Labor returns to Rudd, and is to profit from the change, it will have to be seen to have smashed the spectre of the faceless men once and for all.

The Australian Financial Review

BY Laura Tingle

Laura Tingle, The Australian Financial Review's
political editor, has worked in the parliamentary press gallery in
Canberra for more than 25 years. Laura has won two Walkley awards and
the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism and
has also been highly commended by the Walkley judges for
investigative reporting.

BY Laura Tingle

Laura Tingle, The Australian Financial Review's
political editor, has worked in the parliamentary press gallery in
Canberra for more than 25 years. Laura has won two Walkley awards and
the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism and
has also been highly commended by the Walkley judges for
investigative reporting.